Copyright © 2012 Meng-Hui Wang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The values of electronic components are always deviated, but the functions of the modern circuits are more and more precise, which makes the automatic fault diagnosis of analog circuits very complex and difficult. This paper presents an extension-neural-network-type-1-(ENN-1-) based method for fault diagnosis of analog circuits. This proposed method combines the extension theory and neural networks to create a novel neural network. Using the matter-element models of fault types and a correlation function, can be calculated the correlation degree between the tested pattern and every fault type; then, the cause of the circuit malfunction can be directly diagnosed by the analysis of the correlation degree. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a high diagnostic accuracy and is more fault tolerant than the multilayer neural network (MNN) and the k-means based methods.